Mon, Aug 22, 2011 page7

Obama’s summer reading list leans toward fiction

RELAXING TIME:
For his nine-day vacation the president has photographers to avoid on the golf course, five books to work through and Republican criticism to respond to

Reuters,
VINEYARD HAVEN, MASSACHUSETTS

US President Barack Obama, perhaps seeking a break from harsh reality after a tough summer battling the US economy and Republicans in Congress, has picked a summer reading list that is long on fiction.

The White House says four of the five books that Obama has to choose from during a nine-day family vacation in Massachusetts are novels.

Obama’s reading list — like the criticism from Republicans for vacationing while the economy is stumbling — is a rite of the US summer.

However, his choices ignored the weighty biographies of great Americans typically on a US president’s reading list.

Obama picked up two of the books on an outing with daughters Sasha and Malia on Friday: The Bayou Trilogy, a mystery collection by Daniel Woodrell set in Louisiana, and Rodin’s Debutante, a novel by Ward Just, with a character who becomes politically conscious after moving to a rough neighborhood on Chicago’s south side, echoing Obama’s time there as a community organizer before he entered politics.

The president also bought along books: Cutting for Stone a novel by Abraham Verghese that traces the lives of two boys who are born joined at the skull in Ethiopia, and To the End of the Land, a novel by David Grossman about a mother who tries to keep her son alive while he is at war by hiking the length of Israel, hoping that if she cannot be reached to be told of his death, he won’t die.

He also brought The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson, the only non-fiction work on the list, which describes the US’ migration of blacks from the South.

Republican critics have slammed Obama for vacationing for the third consecutive summer on Martha’s Vineyard, an upscale island off the Massachusetts coast, which was also favored by former Democratic presidents John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton.

They say vacationing at the scenic island, a stomping ground for movie stars and other wealthy Democratic Party backers in August, shows Obama is out of touch, while 14 million people in the US are out of work and unemployment is pinned above 9 percent.

The White House says the country does not begrudge Obama some time with his family, but it has been careful to allow no pictures so far of him at play on the golf course.

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